- Detox.net recently published maps that use the latest government data on drug use and arrests to show how enforcement varies across the country.
- Marijuana arrests remain significantly high in many states, even in some where pot's legalized.
- Methamphetamine is, by far, the drug most commonly involved in drug-related offenses across the country.
American law enforcement agencies made 1.63 million arrests for drug law violations in 2017, according to FBI data. That's nearly a 4 percent increase from 2016, and it breaks down to about one drug arrest every 20 seconds. About 85 percent of those arrests were for possession.
The 2017 National Drug Use And Health survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration shows that drug use and availability are on the rise across the country. At the state level, however, the data illustrate a varied and more nuanced picture.
Detox.net, an online addiction treatment resource owned by the company American Addictions Centers, recently published a report highlighting the different ways in which states charge and punish drug offenders.
In 30 states, methamphetamine was the drug most frequently involved in drug-related offenses for 2017.
That's partly because meth is more tightly regulated, controlled and monitored than other drugs, as Dr. Stephen Pannel, medical director of Oxford Treatment Center in Mississippi, told Big Think.
"Crystal meth is the drug most frequently seen in criminal offenses, because possessing just a small amount can lead to very significant criminal consequences," Dr. Pannel said. "Once a person is hooked on meth, it requires a large amount to maintain the habit. This usually leads to criminal behaviors including theft, to support the habit with money."
Marijuana was the most cited drug in offenses for only two states in 2017. Still, it's surprising to note that, despite increasingly lax cultural attitudes and the legalization of pot in 10 states, marijuana arrests are actually on the rise, with one person being arrested every 48 seconds, according to FBI data released in September.
The map above shows the percentage of total drug offenses attributable to marijuana in 2017. Each state clearly varies in how it pursues marijuana enforcement, especially those which have decriminalized pot, such as Connecticut, Delaware and New Hampshire. Interestingly, Colorado still arrests many people for marijuana offenses, which can include public consumption, illegal sales and underage possession.
A more consistent pair of metrics across the states are the rates of plea deals and prison sentences for drug offenses.
Rhode Island stands out with an exceptionally low share of drug offenses ending in prison time, likely a result of the state's move to roll back mandatory minimum sentencing in recent years.
The rates of sentencing might be fairly consistent on the national level, but the severity of punishment seems to vary across the states, with Iowa as the strictest state and Arizona as the most relaxed.
A 'wake-up' call
Dr. Pannel said he hopes the report helps draw attention to the drug epidemic in the U.S.
"This study serves as a wake-up call on the magnitude of the problem and how the drug epidemic is impacting our criminal justice system. What it shows is that millions of Americans are charged with drug-related crimes and many are incarcerated for it. We hope this will help start a conversation about the need for treatment to help deter these types of crimes."
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulate in the gut of sleep-deprived fruit flies, one (left), seven (center) and ten (right) days without sleep.
- A study provides further confirmation that a prolonged lack of sleep can result in early mortality.
- Surprisingly, the direct cause seems to be a buildup of Reactive Oxygen Species in the gut produced by sleeplessness.
- When the buildup is neutralized, a normal lifespan is restored.
We don't have to tell you what it feels like when you don't get enough sleep. A night or two of that can be miserable; long-term sleeplessness is out-and-out debilitating. Though we know from personal experience that we need sleep — our cognitive, metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune functioning depend on it — a lack of it does more than just make you feel like you want to die. It can actually kill you, according to study of rats published in 1989. But why?
A new study answers that question, and in an unexpected way. It appears that the sleeplessness/death connection has nothing to do with the brain or nervous system as many have assumed — it happens in your gut. Equally amazing, the study's authors were able to reverse the ill effects with antioxidants.
The study, from researchers at Harvard Medical School (HMS), is published in the journal Cell.
An unexpected culprit
The new research examines the mechanisms at play in sleep-deprived fruit flies and in mice — long-term sleep-deprivation experiments with humans are considered ethically iffy.
What the scientists found is that death from sleep deprivation is always preceded by a buildup of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) in the gut. These are not, as their name implies, living organisms. ROS are reactive molecules that are part of the immune system's response to invading microbes, and recent research suggests they're paradoxically key players in normal cell signal transduction and cell cycling as well. However, having an excess of ROS leads to oxidative stress, which is linked to "macromolecular damage and is implicated in various disease states such as atherosclerosis, diabetes, cancer, neurodegeneration, and aging." To prevent this, cellular defenses typically maintain a balance between ROS production and removal.
"We took an unbiased approach and searched throughout the body for indicators of damage from sleep deprivation," says senior study author Dragana Rogulja, admitting, "We were surprised to find it was the gut that plays a key role in causing death." The accumulation occurred in both sleep-deprived fruit flies and mice.
"Even more surprising," Rogulja recalls, "we found that premature death could be prevented. Each morning, we would all gather around to look at the flies, with disbelief to be honest. What we saw is that every time we could neutralize ROS in the gut, we could rescue the flies." Fruit flies given any of 11 antioxidant compounds — including melatonin, lipoic acid and NAD — that neutralize ROS buildups remained active and lived a normal length of time in spite of sleep deprivation. (The researchers note that these antioxidants did not extend the lifespans of non-sleep deprived control subjects.)
Image source: Tomasz Klejdysz/Shutterstock/Big Think
The experiments
The study's tests were managed by co-first authors Alexandra Vaccaro and Yosef Kaplan Dor, both research fellows at HMS.
You may wonder how you compel a fruit fly to sleep, or for that matter, how you keep one awake. The researchers ascertained that fruit flies doze off in response to being shaken, and thus were the control subjects induced to snooze in their individual, warmed tubes. Each subject occupied its own 29 °C (84F) tube.
For their sleepless cohort, fruit flies were genetically manipulated to express a heat-sensitive protein in specific neurons. These neurons are known to suppress sleep, and did so — the fruit flies' activity levels, or lack thereof, were tracked using infrared beams.
Starting at Day 10 of sleep deprivation, fruit flies began dying, with all of them dead by Day 20. Control flies lived up to 40 days.
The scientists sought out markers that would indicate cell damage in their sleepless subjects. They saw no difference in brain tissue and elsewhere between the well-rested and sleep-deprived fruit flies, with the exception of one fruit fly.
However, in the guts of sleep-deprived fruit flies was a massive accumulation of ROS, which peaked around Day 10. Says Vaccaro, "We found that sleep-deprived flies were dying at the same pace, every time, and when we looked at markers of cell damage and death, the one tissue that really stood out was the gut." She adds, "I remember when we did the first experiment, you could immediately tell under the microscope that there was a striking difference. That almost never happens in lab research."
The experiments were repeated with mice who were gently kept awake for five days. Again, ROS built up over time in their small and large intestines but nowhere else.
As noted above, the administering of antioxidants alleviated the effect of the ROS buildup. In addition, flies that were modified to overproduce gut antioxidant enzymes were found to be immune to the damaging effects of sleep deprivation.
The research leaves some important questions unanswered. Says Kaplan Dor, "We still don't know why sleep loss causes ROS accumulation in the gut, and why this is lethal." He hypothesizes, "Sleep deprivation could directly affect the gut, but the trigger may also originate in the brain. Similarly, death could be due to damage in the gut or because high levels of ROS have systemic effects, or some combination of these."
The HMS researchers are now investigating the chemical pathways by which sleep-deprivation triggers the ROS buildup, and the means by which the ROS wreak cell havoc.
"We need to understand the biology of how sleep deprivation damages the body so that we can find ways to prevent this harm," says Rogulja.
Referring to the value of this study to humans, she notes,"So many of us are chronically sleep deprived. Even if we know staying up late every night is bad, we still do it. We believe we've identified a central issue that, when eliminated, allows for survival without sleep, at least in fruit flies."
